Rome, Italy, Dec 4, 2009 / 03:01 pm (CNA).- An international research project is attempting to discover how priests perceive and use the internet. The project, titled PICTURE, hopes to contribute to more effective use of the internet on the part of the Church.

PICTURE stands for “Priests – ICT – Use in their Religious Experience.” The project is being run by the NewMinE – New Media in Education Lab of the Università della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano with the collaboration of the School of Institutional Communications of the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome.

PICTURE hopes to sample more that 400,000 priests worldwide to understand how they view the medium of the internet and what use they have made of it.

Daniel Arasa, professor of Digital Communications at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross said in a press release that the project “represents an original contribution of university research to the priestly year declared by Benedict XVI.”

The results will be made public before the end of the Year for Priests, which is June 2010.

Priests are invited to participate in the study by filling out a questionnaire available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. The survey can be found at http://www.pictureproject.info/?page_id=278